Tribune film critic looks back

Thursday

Sometimes the value of a movie can be measured by how engaged you were while watching it. With that simple criteria, here’s a list of a few of my favorite movies of 2009.

It’s interesting that two of the year’s best animated films — “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Coraline” — use stop-motion photography, in a genre where CGI is now the norm. The first offers pure old-school fun, featuring a great voice cast (George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Bill Murray), a fabulous soundtrack and delightful screenplay, co-written by director Wes Anderson.

Presented in digital 3D, “Coraline” is all about the cutting edge, taking stop-motion animation to new heights. Director Henry Selick (“James and the Giant Peach”) creates a feast for the eyes in this thoroughly entertaining, innovative fantasy.

By far the year’s best CGI animated film was Pixar’s “Up,” with its delightful characters, fun story line and a fine reading by Ed Asner in the leading role. Not quite up to “Wall-E” standards, but even close is better than most.

My two favorite sci-fi films of the year — “District 9” and “Avatar”— exist at opposite ends of the production scale but are equally responsible for pushing the genre’s high-tech envelope. In the first film, high-end CGI effects seamlessly coexist with low-tech videography to create one of the most realistic creature features ever made. Political correctness also runs through James Cameron’s “Avatar,” a large-scale video game demo played in digital 3-D on the big screen. Seamless and immersive, this is fantasy escapism at its best.

Pain courses through the veins of my favorite drama of 2009, “The Hurt Locker.” Directed with raw energy and clarity by Kathryn Bigelow, this realistic character study features Jeremy Renner leading a tightly wound cast about soldiers living on the razor’s edge.

I’m not much for movies based on comic books, but “Watchmen” really blew me away. Long, gritty and surprisingly challenging, this mini-epic tells a complex tale set in an alternate reality where superheroes exist and the world is a much darker place.

Though not strictly a comedy, the dark-humored portions of “Inglourious Basterds” made the film memorable. It’s not the best work from director Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction”), but it’s his most ambitious project to date.

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